KIRKUS REVIEW

A collection of essays on
the father-daughter dynamic.

Editor and novelist
McMullan (Literature and Writing/Univ. of Evansville; Sources of Light,
2010, etc.) presents 24 ways of “knowing” one’s father by accomplished,
independent daughters, each with a folksy introduction to help situate the
relationship in place and time. For many of these authors, the father was a tall,
handsome, impossibly romantic character in the family, removed from the
quotidian, often remote, and whose approval the daughters tried to maintain. In
a twist on this theme, Jane Smiley writes how ultimately relieved she was not to
know her father—who perhaps suffered from PTSD and divorced her mother when the
author was a toddler—because his absence allowed her the space to grow up “free
of preconceptions.” Some of the contributors offer reminiscences following
their fathers’ deaths—e.g., Jill McCorkle in “My Dad.” In “My Father’s
Daughter,” Bliss Broyard fills in a deeper portrait of her philandering,
brilliant, bookish father by talking to his lively, lifelong best friends in
Greenwich Village, concluding ruefully that she should have paid more attention
to her father when he was alive. Melora Wolff offers an excellent view of the
glamorous world of visiting fathers from the first-person, plural view of young
ladies at New York City’s Brearley School, while Barbara Shoup describes her
father’s vanishing into alcoholism in her excruciating essay “Waiting for My
Father.” Throughout, fathers often represent the world of work, whether in the
“special places” like the gambling house that Maxine Hong Kingston describes in
“The American Father” or the sacred writing den that was strictly off limits to
boisterous children, as depicted in Alexandra Styron’s “Reading My Father.”
Other contributors include Jayne Anne Phillips, Antonya Nelson, Ann Mason and
Alice Munro, and Phillip Lopate provides the introduction.

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